Mad Twins - Mad Drum and Bass · 2015-12-03

Two young gentlemen more, who have tenfold the talent Mr. Zuckerberg has. Still they did not earn the fortune he has, though they give so much more to mankind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIBo5I3qv-U That's just not fair.

You Just Mock · 2010-01-30

No iPad jokes here, please, this is not an Apple debating turf. However, iPad meta jokes shall be allowed if not appreciated. Are you aware of the current eight minute iPad commercial? If so, you need to check Collegehumor's mock version. Brilliant idea by the Vice President of meta jokes.

They Are Just As Nervous As You Are · 2009-07-28

Quantum Soccer · 2009-06-28

In the game of Quantum Soccer, the aim is to shape the wave function of a quantum-mechanical “ball” so that the probability of it being inside one of the goals rises above a set threshold. This is achieved by using the motion of the players to alter the energy spectrum of the wave function: when a player moves across the field, the energy that this action provides (or absorbs) enables transitions between certain modes of the wave function. The pairs of modes involved depend on the player's velocity; the exact rules are spelt out in the mathematical details, but it's easy to experiment using trial and error.

Periodic Table of the Operators · 2009-05-28

Wolfram|Alpha · 2009-05-16

Wolfram|Alpha is finally up and running and this is how it welcomed me: "I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that ... Wolfram|Alpha has temporarily exceeded its current maximum test load. See the live video feed of the control center ...". Well, nice geek humor but still unpleasant. But once you get through you will probably be disappointed again, because you cannot do google-like ego-searches like Der Haken ... but ... what you can do is for instance this GDP of Saudi Arabia vs. Mauretania ... if answers like that are actually correct, the engine might be very useful.

FSF launches internship program · 2009-05-08

Students, here is an opportunity to actually do something useful this summer:

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced a new internship program for free software activists, inviting students to apply for its first round of openings by Monday, May 25th.

The program provides opportunities for participants to work closely with FSF staff members for twelve-week terms in core areas of the FSF's work, including campaign and community organizing, free software licensing, systems and network administration, GNU project support, and web development.

Who's Spiral · 2008-12-01

Some of you may have noticed that Processing went 1.0 lately. Going 1.0 is always a nice occasion to try languages out. At least that was what I thought ... First impression: If you write Java, you can write processing right away. You just have to look up a few basics and ready you are. For those who do not write Java, it is still nice for it skips a lot of Java 'write properly' obstacles. Processing seems to be a powerful yet easy to use data visualisation tool. Try it.

Here is my second try. He, who knows what it is and does post it to the comments first, shall receive a piccolo bottle of cheap champagne. Go for it!

The Elements of Style · 2008-10-15

5.21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat

Young writers Inexperienced programmers will be drawn at every turn toward eccentricities in language. They will hear the beat of new vocabularies abstractions, the exciting rhythms of special segments of their society industry, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem for beginners is to listen to them, learn the words, feel the vibrations, and not be carried away.

Stanford Engineering Everywhere · 2008-09-18

Stanford University offers some fine courses on engineering: Stanford Engineering Everywhere. The undergraduate courses introducing computer science look very promising. I checked some of the lectures on programming paradigms so far and they made sense ... just to answer the question Professor Cain repeatedly asked.

Google stores your information securely and privately. We will never sell your data. You are in control, you choose what you want to share and what you want to keep private. View our privacy policy to learn more.</cite>

Harvard Law School embraces Open Access · 2008-05-08

The faculty of Harvard Law School has unanimously approved a motion for open access: articles will be made freely available in an online repository. With the success of this motion, Harvard Law becomes the first law school to make an institutional commitment to open access to its faculty's scholarly publications [...]-- law.harvard.edu

This could easily mean that open access has become - or will become soon - main stream. Let's start looking for another worthy cause to fight for.

Sudo · 2008-05-01

Text Editors · 2008-04-30

It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.

Felton et al. (2004) reported that web-based student evaluations of teaching (SET) demonstrated a student preference for course easiness and instructor sexiness. This study explores these same relationships with a larger and improved database. Results indicate even stronger relationships than previously reported. In addition, this study demonstrates significant cultural differences by institution and discipline in the relationships between Quality, Easiness, and 'Hotness' in web-based SET.

Yahoo! Innovation Teams · 2008-02-16

Yahoo! closed down it's famous Design Innovation Team, firing the whole creative staff. Yahoo! plans to close down all it's innovation teams. Is this the first step towards becoming a Microsoft affiliate?

Sun to Acquire MySQL · 2008-01-16

Sun announced an agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world's fastest growing open source databases. This acquisition accelerates Sun's position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market and reaffirms Sun's position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the worldÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration. The acquisition accelerates Sun's position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today's announcement reaffirms Sun's position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

Pretty much the same. I will need a night to think the consequences over. Yet, one thing is for sure: This truly is a large wedding.

Yet Another New Year's List · 2008-01-03

24C3 · 2007-12-22

The 24th Chaos Communication Congress (24C3) is the annual four-day conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). It takes place at the bcc Berliner Congress Center in Berlin, Germany. The Congress offers lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics and attracts a diverse audience of thousands of hackers, scientists, artists, and utopians from all around the world.

Here are the scheduled events. A whole lot of interesting sessions among them. Unfortunately I can only join at one day ... and I still have to decide which day it will be.

Differential Equations · 2007-12-19

In the video above Prof. Mattuck of the M.I.T. explains the geometrical view of y'=f(x,y): Direction Fields, Integral Curves. It is part of the course Differential Equations.The lecture lasts 48 minutes and is easy to understand and still interesting. Now i know that integral curves can never be tangents.

Open Yale Courses · 2007-12-18

Yale provides some of its courses open access. It comes under creative commons which allows to non commercially share alike or remix as long as you give credit to the authors. That is quite a free license:

Hedy Lamarr Frequency Hopping · 2007-11-26

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."

So said Hedy Lamarr. Later on she and her close friend George Antheil invented the "spread spectrum" technology, which is widely used today both in military communications security and cellular phones. They thought one could use it to protect remote controlled torpedos from being jammed by the enemy. The Navy at the height of World War II considered the idea too cumbersome, which it was, given the technology at hand at that time.

24C3 · 2007-08-26

Beautiful Code · 2007-08-16

Blog follows book: Beautiful Code. As for the book, I made it up to chapter "Finding Things" by Tim Bray, which was my favourite so far. By now my recommendation concerning the book is 'buy'. By the way, all royalties from the book go to amnesty international.

Well, er, I don't see the face recognition use case here. You'd normally have a name and look for the corresponding face. All the "face recognition engine" would have to do, is figure out if the candidate picture shows a face. It does not need to figure out what face it shows. Furthermore most of the pictures showing faces have the relevant information on who it shows somewhere written in the context. There is no proper face recognition involved yet. I cannot query "Guy who stole a bike at Luton main station last Wednesday" and then expect google to return a face and the corresponding name. It just doesn't work ... or maybe it does actually work already, then these would be the suspects. Then I cannot expect google to find faces for names that do not have the relevant information written somewhere in the context ... Not yet. By now it only seems to be a funny feature:

A: Who is your favorite philosopher
J: CanÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t say. IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢m not very much into philosophy.
A: Can a book have no title?
J: Of course.
A: Blimey.
J: Are you British?
A: Does it seem like that? I was born in America.
J: You are definitely flirting!

Cursor Moves · 2007-05-17

Everybody is allowed · 2007-05-14

"The free world says that software is the embodiment of knowledge about technology, which needs to be free in the same way that mathematics is free. Everybody is allowed to know as much of it as he wants, regardless of whether he can pay for it, and everybody can contribute and everybody can share."

Though it appears in the 'money'-domain of CNN under the path fortune, this one is a nice roundup on the software patent issue. Because it doesn't take the stance of either side it is a great intro for the software patent rookie: Microsoft takes on the free world.

The Kaye Effect · 2007-04-17

Athanasius posted The Kaye Effect yesterday. He gives neatorama as source, where they link a lovely youtube video on the 10th of april. I considered it great trivia to post, when I ain't got no time to be creative myself. Tonight this time has come. Obviously tonight this time has come for kottke as well.

Furthermore Sushee has found a free physics textbook named Motion Mountain, which looks promising. So much for now on natural sciences.

How to set up TOR on a Debian Machine · 2007-04-02

To add a serious Onion Routing client for anon web browsing was kindergarten here on debian linux. On my machine I had to add a further packet source with url http://mirror.noreply.org/pub/tor/. Distribution is sarge and section is main. Hence, /etc/apt/sources.list has got one additional line:

now you have to convince privoxy to cooperate with the TOR-client. Do this by adding the following line to /etc/privoxy/config:

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .

Do not forget the dot. This is the most difficult part of the installation process. Put a dot at the end of the line. Now restart Privoxy:

/etc/init.d/privoxy restart

Your proxy is up and running now. Lovely, isn't it? Next step is to make your browser sending requests via Privoxy. Privoxy is running on your local machine on port 8118. This is basically what your browser needs to know. You can put that in the proxy settings of your browser. Firefox users can change the proxy setting with a mouse click, if they use the TOR-Button.

Use TOR. It is a big improvement. Though traffic slows down remarkably if you use TOR.

Tower Defense · 2007-04-02

If you desperately need to kill time, consider Desktop Tower Defense by Handdrawn Games. You have to stop little critters on their way over your desk. To do so you have an impressive arsenal of guns. Nice piece and it does kill a considerable piece of time.

This applet demonstrates a number of complex maps w = f(z). By default the identity map f(z) = z is displayed, but other maps can be chosen. The left grid represents the z complex plane (the domain of f), and the right grid represents the w complex plane (the range of f). Moving the mouse around the z plane will cause a pointer to move in the w plane according to whatever complex map was selected. [...]

Lessig Key Note · 2007-01-05

Take an hour fifteen to see Lawrence Lessigs key note speech at the 23C3. This is a quick and easy to understand walk through licence and copyleft matters. Strongly strongly recommended.

Once you've seen and understood Lessigs speech you could go on and see an interview with John Perry Barlow on the same topic. Here is a short quote to give a hint on what to expect:

[Ã¢â‚¬Â¦]If you wanna share something - share it. If you wanna use something - use it. Try to do so ethically in the sense of donÃ‚Â´ t take things without attribution.[Ã¢â‚¬Â¦] Pay no attention to these people when it comes to being creative. Go ahead and do the stuff that Larry showed in the beginning of his talks and do lot of it. And every time they put a lock on - break it. And every time they pass a new law - break that.[Ã¢â‚¬Â¦]

Person of the Year: You · 2006-12-17

Hm, yes, it might be true. There is a revolution outthere, as far as the possibility of publishing is refered to. But ... who is read. The information you publish becomes valid only if it is read hence shared. But here we still have and probably will have very few information providers who are being read by multitudes and multitudes of publishers hardly being read at all. To the 'not being read' publishers publishing power comes only via ... er, how to call it ... stampede publishing. You only can dig or dis posts of main stream media and even this will only be noticed if a lot of have not publishers do the same. They cannot or not really ignite debates they consider important and which could well be very important. Take the debate on software patents in europe or the debate on surveillance in the ICT age. There is a debate outthere in the web but is it relevant to the deciding folks?

Have Known It · 2006-11-17

Steve Balmer: "Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered, [...] This is important to us, because [otherwise] we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability. [...] Only customers that use SUSE have paid properly for intellectual property from Microsoft"

Ha! I have known something like this would happen. My forecasting qualities are still great. No further comment.

Piccolo Quiz - Little Chap · 2006-10-19

Nobody of my audience could solve the Piccolo Quiz - Bad Code I. This is awful. I have to drown my grief in the unwon piccoloechen now. I've been so proud of you, my dear audience, but now ... bottomless disappointment. Folks, it was so easy. But before solving the problem, we turn to the new task, which demands skills in other fields. Question: In what famous contribution to the set of great movies does the little chap below appear? The first who gives the right answer wins, guess what, a Rotkaeppchen Piccolo. This time answers to the comments please.

Now for solving the previous task: if(number+iterations == limit) was the problem. The function implies that number is smaller then limit when the parameters are passed but never checks if this is the case. So, calling doSomethingUpTo(0, 0) would make the function run infinitely, which is bad indeed. To solve the problem one should consider changing the if-statement to something like if(number+iterations < limit) with iterations = -1 as start value or, if passing number > limit is actually an error, throwing an exception.

Time Series with R · 2006-10-18

Here's an archive containing all you need to print lovely oil and cocoa price time series plots. In the archive you'll find the price data in two .csv files and the R script to read them, make time series objects and plot. Very simple indeed, but they might be useful for intermediate learners to see how to handle time series using R.

What Kinda Wisdom Is This? · 2006-10-15

I just had a fortune cookie, now listen what kinda wisdom they try to sell me:

Faith is knowing that there is an ocean because you have seen a stream.

What kind of wisdom is that? There is not a lot of faith necessary to know that there is an ocean if you see a stream. Since the cookie is made in china the stream that is referred to here streams on planet earth. We can assume that earth is of finite size, since it is some kind of convex spherical thingie.

Now two cases may occure: The stream is of finite length or the stream is of infinite length.

Case one: The stream we see is of finite length. What would be at the end of the stream? Some kind of container to take hold of all the travelling water, hence an ocean. For the moment we can rule out the case of a creek drying out in the desert, because we're referring to a stream.

Second case would be, despite of earth's finite size the length of the stream would be infinite. The stream would then stream full circle. There is no other way to be of infinite length for a stream in a finite environment but what force would make the water travel? A pump station built by some intelligent designer? That second case in which no ocean is needed requires faith, a lot of faith.

Look, fortune bakery, I liked your cookies better when they said things like: Not he is a good lover who pleases many women in his live time but he who pleases one woman for her live time.

Piccolo Quiz - Bad Code I · 2006-10-02

There was not enough code posting here lately. This needs to be changed. So today I start a little series on bad code. Here is the first piece. It does something until number equals limit and returns times_done_something:

Update 22:16 CEST: Obviously I'm not the only one featuring bad code lately. Kevin Poulsen posts bad code at wired.com. Over at wired you can win democracy instead of cheap champagne which is quite a big thing to win. Do not miss the comments over there.

WOS Review · 2006-09-18

The wizards of os always had this twist towards license and law issues when tackling high tech topics. In fact that has been a good thing. However this trend did further increase this year. Most of the panels dealt with these issues rather then with high tech in it's pure form. I'm not sure if I still welcome this trend in its current manifestation. Still there were interesting panels. I learned about license issues in nigerian movie industries and brazilian music scenes, which are very different from what we know about how to market creative work. Furthermore the panel on the EU copyright directive has been interesting.

... but after all I'm not perfectly sure if it remains worthwile to attend WOS in the future.

Estimating Tax Avoidance · 2006-08-21

This is a follow up to german tank analysis. In germany, probably just as well as anywhere else in the western world, the taxes for cigarettes go up and up. As expected this lead to decreasing sales of cigarettes and politicians were pretty proud that they did so very much for public health.

Now the cigarette industry argued that the decrease is rather a symptom of substitution then of avoidance. But how to figure out? Well it is pretty simple and follows the same scheme as german tank analysis. One just draws a random sample of cigarette packs from some arbitrary dump yards and checks for their origin. By doing this one shall get a pretty good idea about how many cigarettes, black market and legal, are actually smoked. One might even figure out what the main smuggling routes are.

RFID Passport Cloned · 2006-08-04

Here is news on the e-passport calamities, that have been discussed here before. The register notes today that the first German RFID Passport has been cloned already. Here is what the guy, who allegedly cloned it, has to say:

The whole passport design is totally brain damaged. [...] From my point of view all of these RFID passports are a huge waste of money. They're not increasing security at all.-- Lukas Grunwald, DN-Systems Enterprise Internet Solutions

A solution I'm sympathising with, is this one by Bruce Schneier:

The best way to solve a security problem is not to have it at all. If there's an RFID chip on your passport, or any of your identity cards, you have to worry about securing it. If there's no RFID chip, then the security problem is solved.-- Bruce Schneier

Maybe with the solution above there is less of a fortune to make with. Maybe that's the whole point and the risk of having a citizen's passport read (and copied?) without her consent is just a marginal issue.

German Tank Analysis · 2006-07-22

Another great piece on why nerds will achieve world domination one day. Consider the following problem:

You are a british general planning the invasion in europe in the latter half of the second world war. One question you really need to find an answer to is: "How many german tanks are there?" in other words you have to estimate how many tanks Germany produced up to a given date. What would you do? You would ask intelligence. A handful of desperate guys on the enemy's ground, always at risk of being captured could try to find the answer ... or you could ask statisticians.

Here is what both sources reported. In the last column the true figures according to German records are given:

German Tank Data

Date

StatisticalEstimate

IntelligenceEstimate

GermanRecords

June 1940

169

1000

122

June 1941

244

1550

271

August 1942

327

1550

342

How could statisticians guess that good? Ok, let's go for it: Obviously german tanks were captured by allied troops. Probably in Italy or Noth Africa. Those tanks had serial numbers. Those numbers were not randomly chosen. The German tanks were numbered as follows: 1, 2, 3 ... N, where N was the desired total number of tanks produced. Note that the tanks captured are a random sample of the german tank population. The rest is Order Statistics and led, according to the Guardian, to the following simple estimator N = (M-1)(S+1)/S, with S being the sample size and M being the highest serialnumber in the sample.

Still, the estimates are astonishingly good. Note that the sample should have been drawn iid, which very likely has not been the case.

Martingale · 2006-07-04

Congratulations to Italia. Life is a game of chance, ain't it? The following groovy script shows how to play roulette the right way. Well, ok, this strategy only provides sure payoffs if 'assets' is infinite ... too bad

Features and More · 2006-05-13

Yet another nice feature one can 'incarnate' using Google's blogsearch in rss mode and MagpieRSS is the the 'Blogs linking here' feature you see in the lower right margin of Haken's pages just above the 'My del.icio.us' division. Fancy ain't it? Well, ok, you have to rely on google's ability to find posts linking here, but when it comes to 'Der Haken' they are more reliable then technorati is. Should work for particular posts as well, though I didn't try yet.

Furthermore, Cem Basman, who posts over at vowe's started a little link dump on IT-Outsourcing. Cem is going to collect news and information about the industry, developments, best practices, etc. both in english and german and he asks us to join the convesation. Ok, lets start then ...

Skyrocketing Hypochondriasis · 2006-04-11

What is it, you need to maintain a truly hypochondric page? Of course the World Health Organisation desease outbreak news is a must. These are easiely syndicated as demonstrated in the lower left margin of this page.

What else would one like to have? Of course a syndication of the "Experts Warn" Google News query, which was featured here earlier. Guess what. Google News queries can be accessed via RSS. Just add '&output=rss' to the query string and done.

Now I have it all. All the bird flu and all the other warnings that might threat the existence of mankind. Lovely.

Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing · 2006-03-19

There are two remarkable features in this movie. One is the most lovely wallpaper and neck tie design appearing there and the second is that they explain the very core the internet in an understandable way. Furthermore they mention the same points that are mentioned today to explain the potential of the technology. I thought computer science was so fast bringing up new approaches thus 'obsoleting' itself. Obviously that is not true for the really cool ideas. Maybe it still holds for inferiour software.

So the movie is interesting not only to geeks, but to any person interested in interiour design and/or in how the freakin internet works. It is also best suited to teach english to 'fachinformatikers'. All the important terms are mentioned. Just lovely. See it.

To test it I used the access logs I was exploring lately. I created a view, 'hitsperminute' on the database containing the hits per minute on free-penguin, as the name suggests. Adding database connectivity to R was no fuzz at all. It just worked. Consider the following code:

Some Simulations · 2006-02-22

More and more creativity is sparked by the spreading bird flu: If you have java 1.5 installed the University Tuebingen offers some lovely applets.
There is QuickFlu (Documentation Page) the influenza calculator, visualizing the effects of treatments on the population and there is InFluSim which lets you drag sliders to set certain variables and then gives you a forcast on proliferation, fatality and costs of epidemic or pandemic outbreaks.

Refined R · 2006-02-19

Those ICE one trains will have power supply on every seat. Today I travelled with one of those. I killed time refining the recent traffic plot. This time I queried hits per minutes and had a closer look at the documentation of R's graphic commands:

News Quakes · 2006-02-15

The pic above shows the hourly traffic from the 3rd to the 8th of January 2006 on free-penguin.org. Free-penguin.org was listed prominently at digg.com which led to a huge increase in traffic. Unlike the recent makezine-post, this traffic did not lead to a whole lot of new free penguins. This is the 'main stream' I guess ... and it is not worth a lot.

Why is this cross posted here? The access.logs were so big (143MB), I had to import them to a database and then query the timeseries. Visualisation is done with three lines of R.

Math Video Lectures · 2006-02-14

Some times I just feel like watching a math video lecture. Here we have two video lectures. One on linear algebra and one, following a completly different teaching approach, on calculus. I always liked calculus better then linear algebra. Maybe those linear algebra guys are bad marketeers:

Evil Wishers · 2006-01-06

And you thought it'd take an agency the size of the FBI or NSA to track down the evildoers. You are so wrong. Finding subversives has become a after-work hobby, everybody can do. Tom Owad has downloaded 260.000 whishlists from amazon, while not violating any terms of use, and checked them for wicked titles and authors.

The wishlists, he could download quite easiely, got name, state and city of the wishlistowner. Once having the wishlists on his hard drive, he was able to automatically check for certain wicked words and authors. The evilwishers city names and states he then passed to google earth to get a lovely map, with the locations of all the wrongwhishers pin pointed to it.

This, one man could do in five hours after work, with two outdated computers, an external harddrive and a DSL connection. Extrapolate this to what those could do, who make a living from this kind of stuff. Here is the whole documentation with scripting and explanations, check it out.

Blogcounter Suspended · 2005-12-28

For the moment I'm suspending blogcounter. This is for the reason given here. I'm not sure whether the accusations are true ... but I'm no risk taker. Of course I won't install Sixtus's recommendation. That'd be way too stampedish.

Frustrating Time-Consuming Fruitless · 2005-12-23

The EU wanted Microsoft to publish it's software interface documentations to enable free and healthy competition on the european software marked. To proove Microsoft's compliantness an independent monitor was asked. Professor Neil Barrett, an IT specialist and independent monitor approved by Microsoft, had this to say about Microsoft's interface documentation:

Google Tyrell & Sons · 2005-12-10

Some weeks ago, Googles activities in practically all internet related fields made Dahlman compare Google and Blade Runner's Tyrell Corporation. Just now, I heard a feature about Googles attemps to digitalse the world's books, hence knowledge. In this feature the Google representative told us Google's credo: 'Do No Evil'. This credo made me remember Dahlman's comparison.

State of the Union Parser · 2005-12-07

This one is kinda a interesting. Take the transscripts of George w. Bush's state of the union adresses and write a little web interface that lets you mark the occurence of certain words. The result is The State of the Union Parser

Girls and High Tech · 2005-11-30

The caption to this picture says: "Any arbitrary problem, that can be described mathematically, can be solved by electron brains. This automat deals with calculations related to vehicle suspensions - which used to be a costly task."

Quite sexy for an east german book published in '62. Yes folks, girls and high tech. This is just the way how to encourage youngsters to become geek. How many fine young men became geek and had to learn that they've fallen for a marketing gag?

Sun Creator · 2005-11-13

I took the time to have a quick glance at Sun's integrated development environment 'Creator', which is freely downloadable at Sun's right now. First impression? Well, if you are used to other Java enhancing IDEs like Netbeans or Eclipse, Creator is a leap forward. Creator strongly aims for the development and deployment of webservices. It comes with Sun's application server and an example(?) database. The whole thing is quite easy to use. It took me less then an hour, to install the beast and deploy the first .jsp. The page would connect to one of the built in example tables and display some of it's content. The .jsp layout was done 'drag and drop' on a grided canvas. You are supported dealing with all those relevant industy standards, like XML and Beans. Well, I didn't even had to check the manual up to now. I'll keep you informed on how 'Creator' works for me.

Last but not least a little remark. Do not give too much on my opinion here, I only had a quick glance, as mentioned above. Next step will be reading the relevant documents to figure out what one is actually supposed to do with Sun's Creator.

Google's Language Attribut · 2005-11-03

Do You sometimes bore yourself rotten, when linking Google. Always the same layout, same terms, same usability? Well, thats over now, 'cause with a Google query you can pass a language attribute named 'hl'. Obviously it can take values from the set of those two letter localization tags. Differently from, what I thought, this attribute does not change the search result. It only chages the appearence of Google. This is a great and 'easy to use' tool to give your pages a somewhat cosmopolitan flair. Check the examples below:

The Hacker's Diet · 2005-10-27

Here's a truly geek e-book on how to become and stay slim (hence attractive?): "The Hacker's Diet". This, of course, is a topic widely discussed and tackled among computerists. The book is written by John Walker with LaTeX. It comes in three parts: Engineering, Management and Details. I love the section on computing tools to track weight loss efforts in the details part. When you became skinny following John's plan you'll at least have a great set of data that you could explore afterwards.

... but geeks outthere be careful. A temporary diet doesn't do any good in coping with moderate 'office rolls'. Consider sustainable changes. For those who feel obese: Under no cicumstances trust your own perception in this field. Dangerous!

Textpattern Shoutbox Plugin · 2005-10-23

Textpattern user, this weekend the jfx plugin is a very simple shoutbox. You know, one of those fancy commenting tools that would not go with a post but just appears somewhere on your pages. This one is so simple, it doesn't even know a senders name or address. Maybe this is something to include in the future. The plugin is tested with texpattern 1.0 and 0.9. Since it doesn't access the database, it should run with more recent versions as well. Make sure you have read, write and touch rights in txp home.

Open Office 2.0 Released · 2005-10-21

Geek Reading: Web 2.0 · 2005-10-19

There is this other buzz word that crosses my paths annoyingly frequent. What is this Web 2.0 thing anyway? I had a quick glance at this O'Reilly article, which is long and tends to take buzz names and buzz words from the late nineties and link them to current buzz words. Is there more then recycling aged buzz to Web 2.0? The following author went to a conference on Web 2.0, which is already rebaptised Bubble 2.0. Here's just a snippet of the newsforge article which is worth reading completely:

I thought giddily for a minute that I should run to the Office Depot across the street from the Argent Hotel (where the conference is being held) and grab some blank CDs. I could then come back to my room and make a slide presentation for a business that would develop a VoIP-based multimedia wiki that would track disintermediated community-generated podcast blog reviews. It would be based on open source software, of course. And cross-platform. And extensible and highly scalable.

Conclusion: Web 2.0 is a great venture capital magnet, just as well as Web 1.0 used to be. Can we even recycle an aged hype? This surely is something that hasn't been done often. In the eyes of the Rough Type Web 2.0 stands for participation, collectivism, virtual communities, amateurism. This is basically what I think Web 2.0 represents. His article is very long as well, but gives you a whole lot of insight as well as some laughs. Unfortunately he ends up in 'criticising gravitation' somehow:

... Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies ... that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. ...

Sorry, Rough Type, the same holds for the invention of 'printing', it layed off loads and loads of monks, who weren't needed to copy the bible anymore. The same holds for the invention of radio and television, for people didn't need to read anymore. The same holds for the invention of writing, for it distracted people from the spoken word as ancient greek philosophers put it once. In fact, it holds for any technology that exists. Technologies are amoral. So what. All I see is a bunch of nerds who made up some buzz words to collect capital. Probably, they'll spend it on lofts and vintage pacman machines. That's all.

Geek Reading: SOA · 2005-10-19

Today we should go for a little geek round up. This is mainly because I have to cancel the Weizenbaum speech in Potsdam. So, what issues are covered currently in geek journals? I read this little piece on SOA. Some guys outthere would call the topic outdated already, but I think those who are affected by it's impact didn't even start to notice properly.

Register: JBoss and SOA:
JBoss is reaching out to a more business focused, less code-centric, audience with JEMS. The notion of separating the business process from the application will mean more business-level managers will be able to wade into development, using a simplified set of development tools - possibly based on drag and drop.

'Simplified set of development tools' for 'business-level managers' are the important terms in the quote above. Yes, true, the division of application and business process could make 'business-level managers' developers ... with simplified tools, but still. Some of those 'business-level' employees, who actually worked with business process managing tools already, know what that means: exception handling, secure transactions, rollback scenarios, modularisation, interface definition, et cetera, et cetera. Even with simplified development tools the task of developing is not simplified. Here we have the big pit fall for SOA, the manager has the power to administrate business processes which would sound good to him in the first place but, business-level manager, your process is more complex then you might think now. Anyway, SOA will remain a buzz issue just because there is a lot of modularisation potential involved:

Register: IBM and SOA:
According to Robert LeBlanc, IBM's general manager for WebSphere, DataPower's products have helped customers manage an increase in web services traffic as they move to more modular businesses processes and architectures under SOAs.

Still, I do not think 'business level' people should start dreaming too 'wet' about it. In my eyes SOA will clearly remain a geek thing.

Textpattern MagpieRSS Plugin · 2005-10-16

Textpattern-user, below you find a text pattern plugin that provides a tag to include rss syndication to your page. I'm pretty sure that's been done before, but in this case it was faster to write a tailored method, rather then downloading and customizing other people's work. This version is already quite generalised. You can pass a variety of parameters to set CSS attributes and to limit and customize the output. The plugin needs magpierss to work properly.You will have to set 'server_path_to_magpie' manually: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/

Update: I pasted a second version with even more parameters and a refined help section.

W.H.O. Content Syndication · 2005-10-15

To add a good deal of morbidity to my colourful pages I, from now on, syndicate the WHO Disease Outbreak News in the lower left margin of my pages. The textpattern plugin is alpha right now, so, I do not publish it now. For the technically interested: I use Magpie to fetch the WHO feed. Works fine as long as you check for default char encoding within the magpie methods.

Weizenbaum in Potsdam · 2005-10-09

Joseph Weizenbaum, professor emeritus of computer science at MIT, will give a speech on "The Responsibility of the Individual - Reflections on Coping with Science and Technology". Since this guy has written ELIZA, the first chatbot ever, this is a serious nerd appointment.

Useless Nerd Fun · 2005-10-07

You do not allow the execution of Javascript.
What You miss is a fadingscript, that fades a paragraph to black
and backwards to the background-color. So, you do
not miss a lot. What you could do to see the hidden
paragraph, if you do not see it already, is marking it with your mouse
or disabling css interpretation.

<script type="text/javascript">
col = 0;
blck = 0;
function cc(){
document.getElementById("butt").value = "Wait ...";
document.getElementById("hid").style.color
="rgb("+col+","+col+","+col+")";
if(blck==1){
col-=5;
if (col>0){
setTimeout('cc()', 30);}
else{
blck=0;
document.getElementById("butt").value
= "FadeOut()";};
}
else{
col+=5;
if (col<256){
setTimeout('cc()', 30);}
else{
blck=1;
document.getElementById("butt").value
= "FadeIn()";};
};
}
</script>
<noscript>
You do not allow the execution of Javascript. What You
miss is a fadingscript, that fades a paragraph to black
and backwards to the background-color. So, you do
not miss a lot. What you could do to see the hidden
paragraph, if you do not see it already, is marking it
with your mouse or disabling css interpretation.
</noscript>

Money Wallet · 2005-09-30

del.icio.us Textpattern Plugin · 2005-09-25

Once again, I've written a five line text pattern plugin. Basically, it provides something, which I've seen at http://hebig.org/blog and which I needed to have as well. It implements a http://del.icio.us/ link to del.icio.us-bookmark posts quickly and easiely. One can find the result under every post, in the dubious link line.

Especially for textpattern plugin rookies, the script might be worth a look, cause one can see how to use those very handy globals, hence how to avoid loads and loads of database transactions. Script status is 'works fine for me', meaning that it is not yet tested intensely. Download: jfx_delicious.php.txt (Source: jfx_delicious.php.src.txt)

Groovy Rookie · 2005-09-21

Say, you were asked to parse a xml structure in order to remove childnodes from certain tag-name specified nodes. The xml structure is large, only automated approaches are feasible. Asume furthermore, the task is a one time shot. So, no need to generalize the classes written.

Asume now, that you have been parsing xml-structures in Java and SAX. You know what objects to construct and what methods to call. Clearly, this a task for Groovy the java based scripting shell. Since we do not need the exception handling fuzz, we do not want to write main methods, that only call it's parent object and one method, and we do not want to compile the mess every time we changed a tiny line, an easy to use scripting environment is what we need. As a second requirement, we want to use methods implmeneted in Java. Again, Groovy provides native access.

After all, we wanted to try out Groovy for months now, yet, we never had a matching task. Is Groovy easier to code then a equal java implementation? I'd say yes. Groovy has got some differences compared to java. For example, watch the use of the iterator 'it':

So, folks, here is my groovy script to parse a xml structure from a file, find all nodes named 'state', remove all branches below each 'state' node and write the result to a new xml file: parseAndRemove.groovy.

American Patents · 2005-09-06

American courts do everything to strangle whatever kind of grasroot innovation by prohibiting the merest attempts to use industrial products in ways not wanted by producers:

The Ninth Circuit has created box-wrap patent licenses. Now the label on the box that says "single use only" is given force of law, and if you refill the cartridge you are liable for patent infringement. This from Lexmark, the company that already tried and failed to control the printer cartridge after-market using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)...Will patent owners exploit this decision as an opportunity to impose over-reaching restrictions on formerly permitted post-sale uses, repairs, modifications, and resale? Will consumers soon confront Ã¢â‚¬Å“single use only, not for resaleÃ¢â‚¬Â notices on more and more products? Will innovators stumble over labels announcing Ã¢â‚¬Å“modifications prohibitedÃ¢â‚¬Â?--MAKEzine

Tag Your Information Properly · 2005-08-31

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CAÃ¢â‚¬â€Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.-- The Onion

Up to this point everything is fine. A public sector organisation publishes its content in an open and documented standard. In this case, the standard is not supported widely. In fact there is only a browser plugin by Adobe. Well there are other programs not running with a browser, that process SVG. This is a fact that the Bundeswahlleiter does not seem to know because he does the following: From the linked startpage he directs you to a page that has no text content whatsoever, which refreshes every 3 seconds and only runs a chunk of javascript. If the script decides that your browser might not be able to display the map properly it concludes that your system as a whole is not able to process the map. In the end you will very likely end up on a page that describes, only in german of course, how to install Adobes SVG plugin. Those who are into webbased information technology will ask 'What is this?' and yes: 'What is this?' Please, Mister Bundeswahlleiter, do not try to outsmart your customers.

Ok, what I did was turning off javascript, have a look at the script sources to figure what the actual page is, the script leads you if it decides your browser is able to process SVG. Ok, for those, who end up on a help page, here is the actual .svgz file you are looking for: http://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/.../atlas.svgz

Update 9:10 CEST: I changed the system. Now I'm running Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.7) with Adobe SVG Viewer plug-in version 3.01x88. Guess where the javascript sends me. To the 'how to install Adobe SVG Viewer' page. Of course, if I use the direct link the file is processed properly.

Update 11:50 CEST: Ooops, sorry they do provide the 'I know what i'm doing' link. I just did not realise it. My fault.

Capital Blog · 2005-08-24

There goes the neighbourhood! I don't know where they came from, but they're covering stories right outta my neighbourhood and, even more important, they use textpattern to deploy. These two reasons make them go to my 'Blogs I Read' list: http://www.hauptstadt-blog.de ... unfortunately they post entirely in german.

All New · 2005-08-21

Design, name, layout, 'next to' everything here has gotten on my nervs lately. So, as a first measure I made it all gray, changed logo and the name. Hopefully this will improve things ... Since I am using this fancy template driven publishing tool, all this was as easy as 'one, two, three' ...

Touched by Noodly Appendage · 2005-08-19

Open Letter to the Kansas Schoolboard. I'm being more and more entertained by the currently evolving (or is it rather 'intelligently designed') debate on science taught in american schools ... and I am touched by His noodly appendage.

Geek Creationism · 2005-08-02

Riding Giants · 2005-07-21

"$150,000 tuition and 4 years of a college education. His greatest achievement." I must say it was worth the expenses. A giant do it yourself Gummibear and a tutorial on how to make your own: http://homepage.mac.com/vasu42/PhotoAlbum5.html (obviously a mac user)

Mi Chiquita Quiere Bailar · 2005-06-23

For those of you who go running. There is this cuban salsa album I have, 'Salsa Cubano DejaVu Retro'. Don't laugh, thats how its called. Anyway, this is some severe stuff that goes right to your feet. You can easily double the distance you run while only using up 1.5 the time you'd usually need. ... and there is more. After some time you start doing the characteristic salsa side-step-stop combinations.

15th Century Encryption · 2005-05-13

What we have here, if we had javascript enabled, is an implementation of a very famous symmetric encryption algorithm. It is an old algorithm based on swapping characters according to a 'passphrase' and alledgedly invented by Leone Battista Alberti. It is one of the polyalphabetic algorithms. It serves very well for short messages. It even is unbreakable, given one uses passphrases, that are at least as long as the message. For long messages it failes miserably, for one can attack it using statistical methods.

How to use it: Choose a passphrase. Type it to the 'passphrase' field. Type your message to the 'message' field. Click the 'encrypt' button. The encrypted message appears. To decrypt a message type it to the message field and press decrypt. Since we use javascript to deploy the algorithm, no information is transmitted through the net, by the way.

Of course the whole thing is more or less proof of concept. It is only tested with Mozilla 1.7. See the code here if you are interested: encrypt.js

Unfortunately, your browser does not support javascript. Thats why you won't see anything, when using the form below. Sorry. Follow the links in this post to figure out what it is all about.

My Brain Hurts · 2005-05-06

There is one interesting trend, which was first observed by James Flynn, american philosophy professor. Average IQ test scores in every industrialized country on the planet had been increasing steadily for decades. Does that mean, we all become more intelligent for decades now? The telly programm speaks a different language. Why is it, that we can measure increasing abilities of pattern recognition among us?

Here is an article by Steven Johnson, published at wired.com, dealing with the topic: Dome Improvement

One reason, Stephen suggests, is that crappy graphical user interfaces and half baked electronic devices train us in this sort of 'IQ test pattern recognition'. Well, that is one statement I like.

Can Microsoft, kde.org, Nokia and Motorola make sure, that we will become more 'intelligent' soon? The next landmark concerning this will be the release of MS Longhorn. Here is an early statement.

Twister WS-BPEL · 2005-04-25

Twister, an almost opensource implementation of a WS-BPEL (Web Service Business Process Execution Language) process management tool. Relies on tomcat, axis and hibernate and might be a great toy. I wish I had mo' time. I guess thats just what one needs, since twister is only 0.3 right now.

Macrobe · 2005-04-18

Maybe it is high time to get familiar with OpenLaszlo: "The Laszlo Presentation Server (LPS) is a Java servlet that compiles LZX applications into executable binaries for targeted run-time environments. Laszlo currently targets the Flash Player."

YaGoohoo!gle · 2005-04-05

Starbucks Delocator · 2005-04-05

Oh look, a starbucks delocator site! How come it doens't use the word Starbucks on it's pages? The site won't show up when people looking for starbucks or the Starbucks Delocator. It is because the site host fears the Starbucks lawyers.

Unwanted Advertisment? · 2005-03-24

Is this spam or is it not? It's the first time I experience this, though I often fear the day when the east asians start spamming in their native tongues ... 'buy lhino holn powdel for vely much stamina'

Moleskine Case · 2005-03-16

I am a satisfied user of the Sharp SL-5500. Those who are into gadgets might know that this the most classy handheld that is to be owned. It is not only the first handheld that came with a fullfeatured physical keyboard. It is also the first handheld that came with a Linux operating system. So, we Sharp SL-5500 users own a sophisticated device, that distinguishes us from ordinary sales and middle managment people and gives us a satisfying social life.

There is one major setback. There is no cool case for the SL-5500. Not one. Only weirdo things that look like tool holders that plumbers wear at their belts∗. These are totally unacceptable for subtle, well educated individuals like us. There is only one option: Make your own. SL-5500 users, of course, are creative.

The question was: What would Hemingway use to take notes nowadays. He used to use a Moleskine, which just now becomes very up to date again, though it is dead wood. Today Hemingway would most certainly be a Sharp SL-5500 user, but would he set aside the beautiful decent black looks of a Moleskine Notebook? Of course not. So here is what I did and what Hemingway would do, with paper, glue, rubber band, furniture wax and duct tape. I hope you are duly impressed:

CoreMedia Live Blog · 2005-03-16

CeBIT 2005 - CoreMedia Live Blog, this shall be the 'live blog' of one of the biggest players in german automated content management. Nice try. Obviously CoreMedia wants to ride the buzzword. Unfortunately, the plan backfired awfully. Apparently, this 'blog' prooves what I suspected for while: "If publishing becomes too easy, the quality of the content converges to an epsilon vicinity around zero." You can see that on my site and you can definitely see it on CoreMedia's CeBIT blog.

With this post I do not comment on the products and services CoreMedia AG provides.

Geek Sports · 2005-03-14

Again there is a message in this post. Here it says: lock your devices, change passwords often, close down deamons that are not absolutely necessary for the functioning of your gadget. Remember Paris Hilton, though blue tooth wasn't involved there (Link).

ICE 1415 Release · 2005-02-24

My very first textpattern plugin! I'll call it the ICE 1415 release. Basically it implements a link with linktext 'I'm feeling lucky' and a randomly chosen link to a post within this site. Note the feature right under my blog's logo. Actually, this plugin is more or less a test, checking whether the whole plugin approach is worth working with:

rand row mysql · 2005-02-22

Awful Computer Criminal Pleades Not Guilty · 2005-02-21

Now, wait this guy pleaded not guilty to causing a computer to perform a function which intended to secure unauthorised access to a program or data held in a computer by using lynx. Lynx the very infamous hacker tool. This awful criminal.

Webseite des Tages · 2005-02-18

The Mean Traitor · 2005-02-02

My fridge, that mean traitor, refuses to maintain low temperatures in it's interiors. It rather establishes temperatures above environment level. For breakfast this morning I had the remains from the freezing compartment, which was basically a Germknoedel. For the rest of displaced food I instanciated the following class model:

rel="nofollow" · 2005-01-30

For a few days now, google supports a tag-attribute rel='nofollow'. Links with that attribute are not followed and not ranked by google anymore. Now, a whole lot of weblog authors hurry to rel="nofollow" enable their comment pages to make comment spamming useless. I thought about it. My conclusion is: 'To rel="nofollow" every comment is not desirable. Not at all.' Why? Because by following links google builds some kind of semantic web thingie. It puts your pages to a certain context by examing who links you and who is linked by your pages. Furthermore, links in comments and trackback are very often part of this link context. By disabling googles context finding capability you kill a strength of weblogs. Maybe you kill 'the strength' of weblogs.

Please, try not to use rel="nofollow". If comment spamming is really that awful in your comments, please check comments anyway. There might be links that you want to set rel="follow". By the way, I did not put any link to this post to give an example for what would happen if we all started using rel='nofollow'.

The Internet Underclass · 2004-12-20

Companies and public bodies are still failing to take accessibility into account when designing their websites, despite the risk of legal action under the UK's disability discrimination laws.

Yes, mate, the same holds for germany.

This lack of action on accessibility is creating an internet underclass, according to web testing firm Scivisium. The company has identified several different kinds of accessibility problems, where the site will only work with a particular browser, or requires the user to change their browser settings to gain access.

Yes, correct again. Dearest webmarketing excecutives, there are not only the physically impaired, there are the technically impaired as well. Please do make yourself familiar with the WCAG, since, if you refuse, you lock out, not only the physically impaired, which you might not consider part of your audience, 'cause they live on social relief anyway (That'd be bad company ethics, but well if you can live with it), you close out the techincally impaired as well. Among those are, and here comes the punch line, Mac users, UNIX derivate users, smart phone users, handheld users, etc. So, people who are well educated, earn salaries well above avarage and/or do adopt trends very early. Got my point? Now, it is your choice.

By the way, I try to meet the standards, for I'd like to be read and I welcome anybody who is interested and, of course, I consider myself part of the Internet Underclass. Maybe, that could be a reason for you as well.

CAPTCHA · 2004-12-02

You see letters, which are distorted somehow. These letters are a password, that you should enter. These approaches are meant to prevent automated form filling. Automated form filling is a pressing issue in the internet, because there are a whole lot of spammers, who would fill any web form just to have their pages linked. If you have forms filled automatically, you definitely leave the field of good sports and even worse you destroy channels of communication between people for the sake of google ranking. Well, since automats do have hard times to filter letters from pixel data CAPTCHA appears to be a good approach. Well, actually it isn't, because you prevent not only automats from filling the form but you prevent the seeing impaired as well. Screenreaders cannot read the pixelized passphrase. So, there are humans that cannot recognize the passphrase, because they cannot see it at all. Actually there are robots already that achieve better results in filtering the passphrases than some of the seeing impaired could ever achieve.

... and thats the whole problem. There are human beings, who have certain short commings that an automat might not have. Those human beings are excluded from certain services, which is bad.

What to do about it? What else could we ask requesters to find out whether they are flesh and blood or semi conductor? Jon suggests logical questions like '5 + 7'. Oh, oh, this should be very easy for a machine that was invented to calculate. What task distinguishes the set of human beings from the set of robots? Must be something related to pattern recognition ... I really don't know.

Groovy · 2004-11-13

This sounds interesting. There is a new Java implemented scripting language in town. Groovy. There have been Nice and Beanshell around but this one is different since it shall become a certified programming language for Java virtual machines. The huge advantage is easy to see. You can call java classes right out of the scripting environment. In perl you would have needed to implement a main method for every object that you wanted to call out of perl, for example, which you afterwards would have called like this: system("java ClassToCall argumentsToPass");. This is definitely not a way to cash in the advantages of a scripting language and a big headed object oriented programming language all at once.

Ok, with Groovy you really seem to have a tool to truely integrate scripting in Java and vice versa. You can call Java objects right in the script without altering the class. Groovy is java implemented, therefore Groovy is bytecode, which should guarantee a seam less running. You can generate Javabytecode from Groovy scripts(!) which sound like a big thing to me. Working with Java should become a whole heck of lot easier with groovy. Imagine that you do not, never ever again need to type public static void main(String[] args){... Sounds great, doesn't it?

Fun With Prime Numbers · 2004-11-10

Are those pages generated faster? · 2004-11-10

Are those pages generated faster? At least they have fancier looks now. The whole thing is still valid xhtml and does not use tables for formatting purposes anymore. Furthermore, textpattern was downgraded underneath. Now we just have to have a look at it.

Ok, back to writing now...

Update: A little advise to those who are new to textpattern. Never try to put PHP code right into your templates. Boah, I puke ...

Template Experiments · 2004-11-08

Hm, this whole database driven weblog thingie remains awfully slow. I have always known that relational databases are something for the brain dead. Anyway, I will experiment with templates within the next few weeks. This will be mainly for the sake of gaining speed. Up to then, remain patient and stay tuned. Sorry.

POI · 2004-10-26

They featured it in a recent javamagazin already and today they promote POI at NewsForge. Yes, it is a nice way to export Excel sheets right from a http based database service, for example. I think .csv should be sufficient, but well, you never know.

rss2sql.pl · 2004-10-17

Those of you who run ThinGamaBlog might fear the day, when it comes to migrating the whole mess to a 'big boys' tool like Movable Type, WordPress or Textpattern. In this special case we deal with Textpattern. Now, how to get the whole weblog mess into the all-new expensive web-interfaced database? Well, the first step is easy. One uses the RSS-feed export feature of ThinGamaBlog. Problem now is: How to translate the RSS feed into SQL statements, because at least textpattern lacks a xml interface? I did not find any automated solution for that problem outthere on the net, so I wrote a little coversion script. It uses perl to parse the feed and write sql statements to standard out. One just pipes them to a file and runs it on mysql. Done, but be careful, if you use haloscans comments there is manual work left, since the exported feed do not reproduce the article id's used by haloscan. Anyway, here 's the script:

This migrating thing does not mean that ThinGamaBlog is a bad tool. It is not, the whole thing was carried out for experimental reasons. ... though they are some minor ThinGamaBlog disadvantages when it comes to larger blogs. Like uploading all the redundant formatting when changing it, for example.

Furthermore, you have some lovely libraries, dealing with all kinds of statistical analysis. So, R is truly great since we believe that "There are no data that cannot be plotted on a straight line if the axis are chosen correctly".

TrickyCalculator · 2004-10-01

All work and no play makes Feuerhake a dull boy. Last night I realized that I didn't implement the slightest algorithm, not even a wrong one, in weeks. So I typed 'vi TrickyCalculator.java' to my xterm. It was hard at first but I finished the program. Herewith I release TrickyCalculator under GPL. Download it and use it properly:

Of course there are more merits to gain, if compiling it yourself and it is of course more fun ... ye bytecode shalt not be sung by thy priest in service, because Java shalt be master of binaries and there shalt be no compiler/interpreter besides it.

Man in the Mirror · 2004-09-27

You know, it is the same all over, people tend to speak about visions, plans and 'how it all should be done' but forget to live it. Michael Jackson reflects on that in 'Man in the Mirror'. Ok, let's start with the man in the mirror, just as Michael suggests. This weekend the straw that broke the camels back fell on my weblog. Those of you, who are into web topics might have noticed, that my pages where a jungle made of embedded tables. The whole formatting was done with <font> tags. There was no chance to figure the document structure the automated way. Not to mention the absence of slightest document structure. Ok, from today on all this is changed and all new, praise the lord. There is one table per page, with head, body and foot. Tags H1, H2, H3, ... Hx are used to indicate headlines. All this shall improve accessibility and readability in general. Since I changed a whole lot the pages might look weirdo, please report if so.

Google API application · 2004-09-06

Update:The URL down here in this post does not point to the service described in the javamagazin article. In fifteen minutes I couldn't find the described service where-so-ever. That is kinda disappointing. Where do they hide the service? Are they scared that someone might plagiarise?

weblogUpdatesPing.pl · 2004-08-31

Since I'm not quite satisfied with the pinging functionality of Thingamablog (I'm afraid blogg.de's spec is not supported) I enhanced Hans Kellners little ping script last night. It now is able to ping several services at once and it's code is refactored. The whole thing was and is smart neat Perl. You may check it here: http://tageloehner.de/weblogUpdatesPing_0.1.tar.gz Download it, set name, url and rss of your blog and see how or if it works and report any weird behaviour.

Thingamablog 1.0b1 · 2004-08-25

This one is a frog leap. They have it all now sftp support, rss news feed aggregation, yes, it collects your subscriptions and you can push button refer to those articles; calendar tags, yes, those fancy calendars; many many new colorful buttons of which I don't even know what they are good for.

Be careful when doing a migration. This tool tends to publish your drafts as well. Check that and repair it manually.

Instant Messaging · 2004-08-24

I'm skeptical when it comes to instant messaging. It is too 'real time' I think. One cannot reach a certain depth in discussion, but today it was just right to have an exciting little story delivered right to my desk. Lovely. Though we had to switch to mail for further discussion ... of course, instant messaging is too 'real time' ... it still was the right channel.

All the best to my story teller, by the way. I really hope I'll read more of this soon. Take care.

System Administrator Appreciation Day · 2004-07-30

eGovernment UK · 2004-07-19

"While significant public funds have been ploughed in to content management and CRM systems, there are few public sector websites that allow us to ask a question and receive an intelligent answer in return. The public clearly hasn't noticed any improvement in public sector websites,"

On Software Development · 2004-06-16

If this statement was true we will endure a huge slow down in innovation within the IT sector. That holds for pure innovation as well as for quality of software, because grassroot developers will step back from the business, leaving the whole field to the big players. While stepping back, they will take with them the very successful way of enhancing software quality by peer review. The big players in turn are not really interested in solving problems or enhancing quality further than absolutely necessary, but in licensing their stuff the 'take it or leave it' way. Furthermore the whole development can do a lot of harm to small project oriented IT service enterprises. They simply do not have resources to move safely in the minefields of patents.

But anyway, if software development isn't about doing cool stuff anymore, what's the use? Being payed for sitting in a cubicle, coding 3d animated cursors for office suites? Urghs!

Report Saturday Wizards of OS 3 · 2004-06-12

The first session on Saturday was the best one so far. It was called 'wikipedia and friends' . Three guys presented how to deal with the topic from different points of view. Apparently, one of the guys was the founder of Wikipedia. (Though I liked the presentations of the others better). There was one sentence that I'll keep in mind. It went loosely like that: 'A Wiki used in an organisation will reflect the state of that organisation. Wiki can be a great tool in organisations that are determined to achieve a certain goal.' Yes, this seems to be true. In organisations that are lacking goals and determination a Wiki does no good. It always goes like this, Boss: "We need to collaborate. Lets set up a Wiki." The Wiki is set up, and it never comes to life. The boss again: "Wiki seems to be a lousy tool, lets get a real ContentManagemntSystem with all rights-, user- and approval management - and that will work." The poor boss doesn't even realise that it is his organisation thats in bad shape, and he just covers this shortcoming with repressive methods like approval procedures. There 's been way more in this session. Go and try to get the slide sets.

The second session covered securing quality of opensource software. The arguments were within the expected parameters, which means, this session was a very good one as well. Go get the slide sets again - especially if you are a 'project manager' and you did not code a lot lately.

The last Saturday session, or rather, the keynote was presented by Ross Anderson and dealt with the future of P2P networks. A whole lot of information in 45min time. Ross actually referred to the Condorcet-Paradoxon by Kenneth Arrow, so Ross can't be all bad, though I'm not sure whether 'distributed hashtables' will become an outstanding breakthrough in the near future ;-) I guess I'll follow this topic.

Report Friday Wizards of OS 3 · 2004-06-12

I don't know for what good reason, but this Saturdays sessions have been better then those on Friday. The conference as a whole, as far as I can say, was again very good. The presence of experienced programmers and developers and young wannabes at the same time always gives me hope that semiconductor driven technologies do something good to mankind, after all. I have to preserve this feeling till next WOS.

OK, Let's begin chronologically and therefore start with Fridays sessions. First, I went to a session about 'software patents in the EU, current developments' That's been one of the hardest sessions I've endured so far. The whole thing covered only really dry law stuff and no PERL. I still didn't want to leave early, because I think the topic is highly relevant for European economies since, in contrast to the US, we have a lot of small business over here. Their business models rely entirely on open source software. In summary, it's been quite hard to follow, but I hope I got the main ideas, and at least I got a couple of contacts to refer to for getting more information.

My second session on Friday was called 'Beyond the UNIX Paradigm'. Ha, that was big fun. There where guys discussing whether to further improve UNIX derivates or do an all new system from scratch. While generally being interested in such architectural topics, I had great fun watching the guys discussing. Nerds in the very best sense. I thought neither the overweight, nor the small nerd with a ponytail and glasses wouldn't exist like that anymore. Respect guys, stay as you are, throwing bottle caps at each other right in front of the audience.

After all, I also learned something about geekcorps.org , being an organisation which is trying to bring means of communication to the least developed countries. Very good approach: 'Give us a phone! So we can call the government.'

Wizards of OS 3 · 2004-06-05

I just realized that we have the Wizards of OS 3 conference down here. It's going to take place from the 10th of June to the 13th of June. That could save my next week. I went to a predesessor and they really discussed topics that became really relevant later on. I really look forward being there.

You cannot be in Berlin for this event? Doesn't matter I'm going to comment using this blog. So, hang on.

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional · 2004-05-22

Today I did actually migrate my ol' school html templates for log and page to 'Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional' ... so, if it looks awful it's all your fault ;-). Let's see how long I can keep it valid. Have a look from time to time.

Free Penguin · 2004-05-08

The stuffed soft toy Tux penguin pattern thing develops promising. I have a little more traffic on that service now and I had some nice mail concerning the Tux development branch. It was nice contact to Linux user group UK. I mean we Krauts always had this unrequited adoration for the United Kingdom. I again spent some time on improving the patterns though I couldn't upload them yet. Since all this is just horsin' around I am actually very ambitious with this. I'm sure this is the same all over but ... anyway ... those new Tux patterns are great fun.

The Tux pattern is out at http://www.free-penguin.org ! · 2004-05-02

This day is larger then life for the open source community. 'Bill Gates made parts of his anatomy publicly accessible?' I hear you ask. No, dude, wrong! The soft toy Tux DNA became public domain at last. See http://www.free-penguin.org/ for detailed information.

Heres to Zdenek · 2004-04-27

Thingammablog · 2004-04-27

I have to admit that Thingammablog is a very well developed piece of software. It didn't leave me unsatisfied up to now. If one likes to run a weblog on a mobile device, that does not have regular web-access Thingammablog is a small, smart and (!)platform independent solution. well, maybe it should support sftp soon ;-)